[ RadSafe ] RADIOACTIVE RODS LOST, THEN LOACATED. Missing rods located.

[Brennan, Mike (DOH)]

I read several popular press articles about this.  A number of people
who felt informed enough to comment clearly thought these were spent
fuel rods.  Others felt that all radioactive materials shipments should
be handled by the military.  

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu
[mailto:radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu] On Behalf Of Geo>K0FF
Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 8:54 AM
To: Radsafe
Subject: [ RadSafe ] RADIOACTIVE RODS LOST,THEN LOACATED. Missing rods
located.

Below is a summary of the missing radioactive rods. A shipment arrived
short one pig with 3 Ge-68 rods in it.

George Dowell
New London Nucleonics Lab


RADIOACTIVE RODS-
Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) -- FedEx Corp. located a missing shipment of
low-level radioactive rods used by hospitals to calibrate CT scanning
equipment.

A cylinder containing the rods, which had been missing since Nov. 23,
was found at a FedEx facility in Knoxville, Tennessee, the package's
destination city, Sandra Munoz, a spokeswoman, said today in an e-mail.
The package was sent by plane Nov. 22 from Fargo, North Dakota, Munoz
said.

"It was always in our custody," she said, hours after Memphis,
Tennessee-based FedEx confirmed that it couldn't account for the
shipment..

The cylinder was one of three, each packaged separately, in a box that
got wet, possibly during a rainstorm in Memphis, where the shipment was
transferred for the last leg of its journey to Knoxville, Munoz said.
After delivery on Nov. 23, the box had water damage and one cylinder was
missing.

FedEx retrieved the cylinder today in Knoxville, Munoz said.

"My guess, and we are looking into this, was as they were doing the
sort, they came across a box with no label on it, they set it aside,"
Munoz said. "They knew we were looking for a cylinder, but they never
opened that box until today."

The recovered cylinder, about 10 inches long and weighing 20 pounds,
held four rods of germanium-68. They are used in CT, or computerized
tomography, scans in which X-rays from a variety of angles produce
cross-sectional images of patients' bodies.

Total radioactivity for the rods is 684 megabecquerels, the equivalent
of about 18 microcuries, said David McIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The rods aren't considered significant
sources of radiation, according to the International Atomic Energy
Agency.

If someone had opened the canister, "it would take like 1,000 hours of
exposure to get a skin blister," Munoz said.

She declined to identify the final destination of the package. FedEx is
the second-largest U.S. package-shipping company after United Parcel
Service Inc.

--Editors: Ed Dufner, Elizabeth Wollman

To contact the reporter on this story: Will Daley in New York at
wdaley2 at bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ed Dufner at
edufner at bloomberg.net









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